Healing Stones

by Nancy Rue

  Porphyria had been trying to tell him this for thirteen years. So had Ethan. So had God Himself. Now it ran through him like barbed wire. He couldn’t ignore it anymore.

  But there was still a trace of Demi in his mind as he made his way to the door.

  So Van Dillon was the photographer after all. Either Zach Archer was a “moron,” as Demi herself would say, or Van Dillon wasn’t. Tatum had pegged him as one, although Sully had seen evidence of his general cluelessness the night he’d attacked her in front of the bakery.

  That still didn’t explain how Estes and St. Clair got the pictures. Maybe Van saw a way to make even more money than Zach had paid him, and sold the photos to them too. It was an ugly thought, but one he couldn’t dismiss.

  Nor could he bypass the possibility that Zach Archer was headed for a mental split. Manhandling Demi—exposing his dark side— verbally abusing her—those weren’t signs that Demi was entirely safe.

  Sully stopped at the top of the age-sagged steps. Maybe he should return to Washington and walk her through this. He’d made a commitment to her, and his own issues would still be here when he came back.

  “I wondered when you were going to find the nerve to get out of your car.”

  He squinted at the silhouette in the screen door. Ebony. Tall within. Expectant in that way that offered only two choices: go to her with the courage it took to be healed, or run like a rabbit and live in fear of those taillights forever.

  “Now if I can find the nerve to get from here to the door,” Sully said.

  “No need.”

  The door swung open, and she strode toward him in two magnificent steps, arms open. Sully fell against her and sobbed.

  “The good Lord has enough nerve for both of us,” she hummed in his ear. “He always has enough.”

  Sully thought he remembered every inch of Porphyria Ghent—until he was face to face with her again. Now he sat across from her on one of a pair of matching red-and-gold chintz love seats worn shiny by years of sit-downs with those brave enough for her wisdom. He knew, as he always did at these back-again times, that there was no way to recall all the details of her complexity unless he was in her presence. It kept him coming back.

  She sat on the other love seat, coffee-colored hands folded in her lap. Every few moments she nodded her close-cropped head, iced in white like a cupcake. Now and then she let a still-black eyebrow rise and fall. Always her eyes stayed on him, in wonder, like a child’s. A child with a soul as old as compassion itself. He’d forgotten the two tiny exquisite vertical lines on either side of her mouth, the only trace of wear on her face. He hadn’t remembered the way her chin sloped back to her neck like that of a marvelous knowing turtle. How had it slipped his mind that her depthless java skin was all one seamless piece, like her self?

  “Looks like you’ve been holding that back for some time, Dr. Crisp,” she said finally.

  Sully ran a hand under his nose and drew back mucus. He looked at her helplessly, fingers dripping.

  “Kleenex is right there on the table,” she said. And then her lips, full enough for thirty smiles, parted and lit her face, and the room, and Sully’s heart. “You’re still an incorrigible kid, Sully Crisp. I’m glad to see it. Now we can get some work done.”

  Sully blew his nose noisily and nodded toward his shoes. “You mind?”

  “Take them off—and that ridiculous sport jacket. Did you think you were coming to a board meeting?”

  “I thought I was a grown-up, Porphyria.” He shrugged off the jacket and tossed it at the rocker next to the fireplace. It slid to the floor and lay like a puddle.

  “There was your first mistake,” Porphyria said. “It’s the first one everybody makes.”

  Sully worked each shoe off with the toes of the opposite foot and folded his legs up under him on the love seat.

  “Now grab a pillow.”

  Sully cocked his head at her.

  “You’ll end up hugging a pillow before you’re through. You might as well go ahead and grab one.”

  Grinning, Sully selected a yellow-and-gold striped one from the comfortable tumble of pillows on the floor. As he pulled it to him, the tears threatened again.

  “Let them come,” she said. Her eyes were closed.

  “You can feel them,” Sully said. “You can feel my tears.”

  “And now so can you. Holding them back is the second mistake most people make.” She opened her eyes and widened them at him. “Now suppose you tell me about the rest of them.”

  “The rest of the mistakes?”

  “Starting with the last one you made—up there in Washington.”

  Sully let his head fall back and gazed around the room as he filed through what now seemed like an endless list of wrong turns.

  Every nook and corner of the room burst with a drum or a zany carved giraffe or a cane carved and waiting for her to need its assistance, which hadn’t happened yet, not even at eighty. On a dim square of wall, crowded between an illuminated copy of the Lord’s Prayer and a photo of a tribal African woman and her slip of a baby, a diploma from the Graduate School of Psychology, Purdue University hung.

  Porphyria Ghent, Doctor of Psychology, 1956. In its plain black frame, it didn’t announce that she was the first African American woman to receive an advanced degree at that university. Nor did she. The education of this wise woman had taken place wherever she went, wherever she touched lives, wherever she found truth.

  Sully looked now for another piece he’d forgotten, and it was still there. The prayer stand, in front of the dining room window that looked down over the mountainside, now frosted in lavender. That was her true classroom—the place where she went to her knees and wept and cried out and whispered. And listened.

  “I made the same mistake I’ve been making for thirteen years,” Sully said. He pulled his eyes back to Porphyria, who still watched. “I tried to help someone else find her answers, to keep myself from finding my own.”

  “I’m sure you did more than ‘try to help.’ I’m sure you immersed yourself into her issues like a fat lady in a hot tub.”

  “I did. You know I did.”

  “Well.” She refolded her hands as if they were handkerchiefs she’d just ironed. “Why didn’t it work this time?”

  He shook his head. “I don’t think it’s ever worked completely. I look back now, Porphyria, and I realize that with every new project I took on—the clinics, the radio show, the books—I tried to bury it deeper, but a little bit managed to seep out.” He gave her a wobbly grin. “I’m like a backed-up septic tank.”

  “Now there’s a lovely image.”

  “I knew better. I would turn myself inside out not to let a patient do what I’ve done with my own stuff.”

  “You finished?”

  “Finished what?”

  “The self-flagellation. I don’t want to interrupt you until you’ve got the job done.”

  Sully let his chin drop to his chest and watched his knees disappear in a blur. “That’s why I’m here. If I don’t stop, I won’t be any good to anybody.”

  “Least of all yourself.”

  He looked up at her. She’d narrowed her eyes.

  “You’re saying I’ve had a death wish?”

  “I’m saying you have had no regard for Sullivan Crisp, the man in pain.” She fluttered a hand at him, like the ruffled feathers of a disgruntled dove. “Hear me, Sully. Hear me all the way down into the bottom of your hurting self where you can’t forget it. Like everybody else, until you’re dead—you’re not done.”

  He wanted to laugh. He was afraid he’d cry. He did neither and simply sank back against the love seat.

  “Now—are you ready to go to work?”

  “Yes,” he said.

  “Then the Lord be with you.”

  “And also with you.”

  “Let us pray.”

  Sully’s young wife, Lynn, had been so tranquil during her pregnancy. The anticipation of having a baby wrapped her in an almost-euph
oria that at times glowed on her skin, at others sent her into reveries even he couldn’t intrude on. Some evenings he watched her sleep, probably more deeply than the baby herself, and felt boyishly left out of her dreams.

  He couldn’t wait for Hannah Lynn Crisp to make her entrance— so that he, too, could be a part of her life. When she was born— peach-colored and fuzzy-headed and warm—he stood, first on one foot, then the other, while Lynn breast-fed her so he could hold her and croon her to sleep. He squeaked the floorboards as he paced endlessly to give Lynn a break from the colicky crying. As for diapers, he prided himself on being able to change even a poop-up-the-back in less than five minutes. It was all joy.

  Lynn, however, didn’t seem to share the pleasure. She wasn’t sleeping. She wasn’t eating. And the pregnant glow was replaced by a pallor that finally forced Sully to call her doctor when she refused to.

  “This sounds like postpartum depression,” the obstetrician told him, as briskly as if he were diagnosing tonsillitis. “Bring her in and we’ll get her on medication until those hormones right themselves again.”

  He’d reassured Sully that her condition was common and easily treated. Maybe she’d benefit from some good therapy in case there were issues about being a new mother, but the medication would ease the symptoms so she could enjoy the baby and be able to look at things clearly. Sully collected himself in relief, packed Hannah into her car seat, and bundled Lynn into her coat. On the way to the doctor’s office, he gave her an upbeat rendition of her condition and the ease with which it was going to disappear. She seemed less than convinced, but Sully knew she was just too tired to resist.

  Sully had the prescription filled and bought the formula and fixed the first bottles, because on medication Lynn didn’t want to breast-feed. He constantly reassured her that she was still a wonderful mother, and didn’t mention it when he noticed little Hannah cried less and thrived on her new diet. Slowly, Lynn began to sleep and eat and even laugh. Hannah again became the light in her eyes. Three weeks after she started medication, Lynn told Sully she was ready to stop taking the pills.

  “What does the doctor say?” he asked.

  “I haven’t told the doctor.” Lynn directed her very-brown eyes to a tiny speck under Hannah’s miniature fingernail. “Belinda says I don’t need them.”

  Sully experienced a chill he later pinned down as a premonition.

  “Who in the Sam Hill is Belinda?” he said.

  Lynn’s voice immediately rose in pitch, and her cheeks blotched the way they did anytime she and Sully headed into uncharted territory. “She’s a Christian counselor I’m seeing. I met her at Bible study—she’s licensed and everything.” She pulled her hand through her hair and let it fall, defiantly, to her shoulders.

  “You’re seeing a counselor? Since when?”

  “Since yesterday. The doctor said I could benefit from therapy.”

  “But you’re doing fine on the medication.”

  “That’s just it, Sully.”

  Hannah whimpered in her arms, and Lynn hurried to the swing to enthrone her there.

  “That’s just what?”

  Lynn put her finger to her lips and shot him a look. He lowered his voice.

  “What did this Belinda say about your medication?”

  “Her name is Belinda Cox.” Lynn’s words were like a picket fence between them.

  “You didn’t even tell me about this.”

  “I wanted to meet with her before I told you.”

  “But I don’t understand why you felt the need—”

  “I’m feeling guilty, okay?” She put her hand over her mouth and breathed into it.

  “Baby—guilty about what?”

  “About not breast-feeding Hannah. Belinda said doctors give you medication to get you to stop calling them.”

  “What?”

  “Sully—shhh!” She turned to Hannah, who dozed nicely to the rock of the swing.

  “She says what I really need is a deeper faith in God, that He can guide me to be the kind of mother I want to be.” Lynn’s voice caught, and Sully watched in dismay as her face twisted against tears. “This is a lot harder than I thought it would be—being Hannah’s mom. I don’t want to mess it up.”

  “Oh, baby.” Sully went for her, his arms already curved in the shape of her, but she backed against the wall.

  “I think Belinda’s right,” she said. “I haven’t gone to God with any of this, and that’s why it all built up in me and I felt like I couldn’t do it.”

  Sully dropped his arms to his sides. “Is this Belinda Cox a physician?”

  “No—but she has the deepest faith of anyone I ever met. She knows truth, Sully.”

  “Lynn. Dr. West is a Christian. I’m a theology student—you don’t think I have faith? Both of us know what this medication is doing for you—it doesn’t mean you can’t still go to God.”

  “As long as I’m depending on something other than God, He isn’t going to help me.”

  The statement sounded so rehearsed, Sully had to look twice to make sure she wasn’t reading it from a tract.

  “Is that what you think?” he said. “Or is that what this Belinda person told you to think?”

  He didn’t mean for it to come out like a swipe at her ability to decide for herself. But the instant he said it he knew that was how she took it, and a door slammed in his mind—the sound of Lynn shutting him out.

  They reached an uneasy compromise. She would ask the doctor how to come off the medication. The leaflet that came with the pills— the one he’d read the night they got them—warned the patient not to stop taking them abruptly. And if she showed signs of depression again, they agreed they would revisit the issue. He didn’t offer to make the call himself, and he forced himself to trust her and not phone Dr. West on the sly. But he couldn’t avoid watching her, scrutinizing every morsel of food she didn’t eat, every sigh in the night.

  The change was obvious within days. She woke up crying—fretted when Hannah wouldn’t take the breast again—hurled herself on the bed when Hannah spit up. He begged her to at least call the doctor.

  “This is just withdrawal,” she told him tearfully. “I’m making progress with Belinda. God is here.”

  Sully prayed to God himself—and he had no sense of peace that any of this was right. The day he came home to find Lynn rocking a screaming Hannah, tears rolling down her own face, he broke his vow and called Dr. West from his study upstairs.

  As soon as Sully told him what Lynn was doing, he said, “Do whatever you have to do to get those pills into her, Sullivan. And bring her in here first thing tomorrow morning.”

  Sully stopped. He realized there was now a plate of cold chicken and potato salad in front of him. Food always appeared as if by angel delivery at Porphyria’s. He nibbled at a wing, poked his fork into the salad.

  “Now I’m scrutinizing what you’re not eating,” Porphyria said. “Take a break and get that in you. You need sustenance for the rest of this.”

  Sully abandoned the wing to the plate and smeared his hands on his jeans. “The rest of this” stretched before him like a dark endless road, lit only by red taillights. He would rather swallow that chicken bone whole than go down it. But there was no road behind him to retreat on. He was stuck here, where he could only sink down—or he could move ahead into pain he wasn’t sure he could endure.

  He must be a sadist to be in the business of therapy. How many times had he coaxed clients to press on down similar paths, reassuring them the demons wouldn’t get them, when those same demons had been threatening them for years? He could see Demi cringing in terror halfway down her road, Zach Archer snarling behind her, and no light before her. And he had left her there alone.

  “Don’t you do it,” Porphyria said.

  Sully snapped his face toward her. “Do what?”

  “What you’re doing—trying to find a bunny trail to go down so you don’t have to face this.”

  “I think I can do the rest on my o
wn,” Sully said.

  “Mmm-hmm.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “I never took you for a coward, Sullivan Crisp.”

  “I’ve been a coward for the past thirteen years.”

  “And that brow-beating you’re doing on yourself isn’t working either. Come on, my friend. You know what you have to do. Rest. Eat. Then we’ll go on.”

  He stared down at his hands, twitching in his lap. “I don’t know if I can do it without going over the edge. I told you about the panic attack.”

  “Did you go over the edge then?”

  “Nearly. You want to know what’s ironic?”

  “Mm?”

  “The man that talked me down was the husband of the woman I’m working with—the man who won’t take her back.”

  He let his voice fade as Porphyria shook her head.

  “Bunny trail,” Sully said.

  “And you don’t need it.” She grew still. “It takes courage to go on with an experience like that behind you. You’re always afraid your psyche will assault itself again.”

  Sully swallowed hard.

  “You know the minute you emerge from that place of terror that you have to learn to live differently.” She leaned in. “You have to learn to be your own friend and confidant and comforter. It takes courage to believe you can be.” She sat back again. “Now—either eat your lunch or start moving through. You got no other choices. But I will tell you this.”

  He looked at her, and he knew his face begged her to tell him something that would take this cup from him.

  “You cannot be the man you are, the man I know, and believe that God is going to let you drop off the ledge when you’re facing the truth—His truth, Sully. Do you think for a minute that I’m going to let it happen?” She gave a marvelous grunt. “Who did you learn from, son?”

  “The best,” Sully said.

  And so he stepped forward, back to May 6, 1995.

  CHAPTER THIRTY - FIVE

  Sully had made a point of coming home at breaks between classes to check on Lynn. Usually she was in the rocking chair holding Hannah. Dishes were piled, crusty, in the sink. Laundry erupted from the basket and spilled out onto the floor. The refrigerator refused to produce food when the last of it was gone. Sully was sure she sat in that chair with the baby all day. Whenever he came into the house he heard her whispering to their child—until she knew he was there, and then she shut herself down.